Currently have an original DS6100 with mirrored 320gb boot drives, and I’d like to replace those drives with my newly acquired 500gb drives (these are the officially supported drives for the DS6100). Can I simply replace one 320gb drive with a 500gb drive, have the system perform a RAID rebuild to the new drive, then replace the other 320gb drive with the other 500gb drive and rebuild once again? Assuming this would work, I suspect I’d have 320gb volume sizes on my 500gb drives, which I could manually expand afterward to 500gb via Windows ‘extend volume’ utility.
Any ideas / suggestions are most welcome — thanks!
You should be able to do the RAID rebuilds as you describe and they will be 320gb as you describe.
Your flaw lies in the extend part. Raid presents drives to windows as Volumes (whatever) so windows will only see the 320gb volume and there will be no space to extend to.
I am not sure if the raid utility itself that you run in windows has an option to extend the array. My first thought was to backup the install and then restore it to a new drive but I do not remember/know if you can get into the raid config from boot to define the 500gb raid/mirror/array
What you want to do may turn out to be more difficult than it should be
I haven’t performed the upgrade just yet, but plan to do so shortly. I also reached out to WD Tech Support to try to gain additional info on the procedure, but frankly they were less than helpful. My plan is to perform a full disk backup (I’m using StorageCraft ShadowProtect, good backup utility for bare-metal restoration), restore to one of my 500GB drives,then boot the machine with this drive only. If that goes well, then I’ll pop in the second 500GB drive and hope that it rebuilds the mirror to it. I think this is the only way to upgrade my drives and get full access to the entire 500GB volume. I’ll reply to this forum when I’ve accomplished the work. Wish me luck!!
I looked up StorageCraft ShadowProtect and it is very expensive. I originally tried to use the Linux PartedMagic tool which has CloneZilla on the live disk to do a clone but it did not support the software RAID. I assume I need to use a windows PE environment to load the RAID drivers in, are there any low cost clone utilities that will work?
SP is pricey, but it is a great Server Backup, but even better than backups it does great Restores. It has a lot of flexibility and is much faster that the built in Windows Server Backup
But my thoughts are you could actually clone your disc(s) from a normal desktop. The data on the drive would clone in the desktop, you just need the raid drivers to see the data in the WD box.
Only thing it would cost you is time as the original drive should not be changed ? I dunno, just an idea
I was thinking to put one of the boot drives in a normal PC and make an image of it with CloneZilla. If anything ever happens in the future I can restore that image to one of the OS drives and wipe the other forcing the RAID software to do a rebuild. I don’t know if it will work though. After a recent crash and being unable to restore an automatic windows image backup I have little faith in windows backup utility and want to make all sorts of backups. it seems the data corruption got propagated to the windows backup image and that is why the windows restore failed. I tried this method after the recent crash but it didn’t work but it could have been because the corrupt data got copied to the “good” drive.
StorageCraft ShadowProtect seems to be $1000, for that type of money I would strongly consider ditching this server and buying a server with true hardware level RAID.
